Work Hard, Be Nice: Product Management Lessons, Week 1

tl;dr: Be Curious. Learn and Listen. Test everything. Attend only important meetings. Work Hard, Be Nice

I recently got my undergrad degree from UIUC and took a three-month holiday with some close friends. Last week, I joined LinkedIn as an Associate Product Manager in the LinkedIn Ads team. These are some lessons I took away from my first week at LinkedIn:

Learn, Learn, Learn, Listen, Listen, Listen

I recently finished college, and I was very excited to simply start working and getting involved in a lot of projects. However, being a complete novice to the advertising business, I spent most of my first week doing two things:

1) Reading every Wiki on the server about how the different teams operate and how advertising works on LinkedIn.

2) Attending every relevant meeting, listening intently, and taking a lot of notes.

As excited you might be to immediately start contributing to projects, it’s imperative that you learn as much as you can and build a solid foundation. Although it was very tempting,  jumping straight to projects would have left me with an incomplete picture of the processes and more questions in my head than answers.

Curiosity Required

I recently read this fascinating article by @cap titled Curiosity Required

“It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s not optional. It’s required. Put it on your job postings, make it part of your interview loops, embrace it as part of your companies’ cultures. When you’re surrounded by driven and creative people with a constant thirst for knowledge, you’ll be glad you did. And when you’re surrounded by apathy, you’ll be sorry that you didn’t.”

Ask questions when you’re stumped, and be genuinely interested in what people have to say. You’ll be in a lot of situations where you’re the only one in the room who doesn’t know the name of that acronym or a well known engineering process. Stop the person, and ask them to explain it to you. If the meeting is time-sensitive, take notes and don’t forget to ask your mentor/manager later. Personally, being straight out of college and suddenly entrusted with working with the smartest people I’ve ever met has been the most challenging yet fulfilling experience yet.

“Test the sh!t out of the product”

I asked one of the fellow PMs on the team: “What’s the best way to understand this product? ” My colleague replied saying: “Just test the sh!t out of the product”

To me, this was the single most important advice of the week. I spent a couple of hours playing with the ad campaign creation workflow trying to see if there was something that was missing or things that could be improved on. I tried to play with every single action that could be possible, and paying attention to small details that could be improved on. Spending a lot of time playing with LinkedIn Ads helped me understand the innards and also brought out a ton of meaningful questions I could ask my mentor later.

Meetings 80/20

First day of work, and boom! my calendar was full for the rest of the week. Being a PM, you’ll be responsible for communicating with different parts of the organization. This means you’ll be sitting in a lot of meetings with business operations, marketing, technology, QA etc. On asking my mentor: “How do you deal with this meeting overload?” She said: “I follow the 80/20 rule. I only attend 80% of the meetings that I am absolutely required in” Although she added, that in your first week you should attend as many meetings as possible to get a high-level overview of how the different teams work.

Work hard, Be nice

Thank people for taking time out to educate about things that they have been doing for years. Make a conscious effort to remember names and what project/team they are working on. Work as hard as you can to understand the fundamentals.

Hope you liked this post! These views are my own. I’ll try to make this a weekly or bi-weekly post as I learn more about Product Management. Feel free to comment here with your views. You can follow me on Twitter: @nikunj